Ever wanted to know who are the three worst sources for errors in your System event log? Here is a simple approach that yields the source names with the most errors:
Get-EventLog -LogName System -EntryType Error | Group-Object -Property Source | Sort-Object -Property Count -Descending | Select-Object -First 3 -Property Count, Name
Key is the use of Group-Object: this cmdlet groups items by a property. All error events are grouped by source. Next, the groups are sorted by size, and the three largest groups are returned.
This works with many things. Here are the top 3 file types in your Windows folder (add -Recurse to search the entire tree):
Get-ChildItem -Path $env:windir | Group-Object -Property Extension -NoElement | Sort-Object -Property Count -Descending | Select-Object -First 3
And these are the three most frequent numbers in a series of numbers:
$numbers = for ($x = 1 $x -lt 1000 $x++) { Get-Random -Minimum 1 -Maximum 7 } $numbers | Group-Object | Sort-Object -Property Count | Select-Object -First 3 -ExpandProperty Name
